Up till this point Facebook has always made use of the 20% text rule when it came to determining which images were allowed to be used for advertised posts. This meant that so long as your text did not cover more than 20% of your ad image – you were good to go! Well – not anymore. Rolling out as of 6/8/2016 is a new algorithm – one that lets you use more than 20% of the ad image for text – at expense of your audience size.
Ad images are now given one of 4 ratings:
- OK
- LOW
- MEDIUM
- HIGH
The rating symbolizes how much text is in your image, and as such how big of an audience Facebook will serve your ad to. Images with an OK rating will be served to the largest audience, while HIGH rating images may not be approved at all.
The new text guidelines come with some noteworthy exceptions as well. First off – products and product packaging may now be included within the ad image without being counted as text. The key guideline here is to ensure the entire product is within the image and that your not just zooming in on the logo. The same concept applies to book covers as well.
Text based logos, numbers, watermarks, and anything else that might resemble text will still be counted against you.
For those of you who had to constantly tweak ad images to fit within the old 20% rule, scaling down logos and jamming text together – the new changes should bring a sigh of relief since these changes give you a lot more flexibility with how much and where you position your text.
Since there is no more 20% count, and as such no more grid overlay that can be used to test your images – Facebook has rolled out a brand new tool: the Text Overlay tool. Much like the old Grid tool, you can upload your image and Facebook will let you know which rating it gets. Check out the tool here.
I did a detailed talk on this change in the video embedded above. If you wish, you can watch it directly on my YouTube channel here.